Monday Night Football Recap: The Hail-Mary Riot

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So you slept.

No problem. It's hard not to feel that the best Monday Night Football moments have something to do with staying up too late, just to be sure nothing really funky happens at the end. That's a certainty. But it's okay; usually it's a waste of time. Sure, over the decades, Monday Night Football has been a paradise for remarkable comebacks, wicked lucky catches, and franchise-defining collapses. Time was if you missed them, you had to listen to this series of shmoes, Indian-circling the water cooler, because they were the ones with the grip on how it went down, and so they described the leaping, scrambling, staggering action, the unluckiest of unlikely moments which you missed simply because you decided the time had come to jerk off and go to bed.

These days, of course, you watch the replay — the moment you wake up, on your phone, on your kitchen television, on the monitor on your bus, in the elevator of your office building — so you at least can have an opinion by the time the storytelling begins at water-cooler city. These days, you can't really miss a thing, not with Monday Night Football, the ESPN flagship. Not even if you sack out.

If that's all you saw — just the replaying of Golden Tate's controversial catch — then you missed a generally great game between two generally great teams: a gritty first-half effort particularly by the Seahawks' defense, who sacked Aaron Rodgers eight times in that half; a reversal of fortune in the second half, when the Packers so dominated time of possession that, a good portion of the way into the fourth quarter, the Seahawks had only a single yard of offensive production. Clay Matthews, looking ever the part of the NFLs only hairless chupacabra-salamander, righteously pursued rookie quarterback Russell Wilson with the manic intensity typical of pale blond wigged men born in lightless Appalachian cave lakes, which is to say he almost got him once! The game also featured a Cedric Benson rollout by the Packers. Benson, who seems to think three yards a touch is the gold standard for five-year veterans with clean uniforms, pleased everyone mostly by taking off his watch before the game. In the Packers' bright-white roadies, Big Ced gives off something of the four-cornered aura of a mascot for Wonderbread: chocked full of good stuff that isn't really in there. Benson practically ran backwards at his own one-yard line, right before all the fuss with the Seahawks' comeback began. And then he dropped the ball. As for the Seahawks, except for the smartass who decorated their uniforms by tossing a green Frisbee into the the team dryer on high, they looked —for minutes at a time — like a team to be reckoned with. And the Packers reckoned with them, too, just fine.

So then game the final minute.

This is where the replay you've been seeing kicks in. The sequence opens when an exhausted and clearly overwhelmed crew of replacement referees unsheathes a particularly long display of egregious errors, flag after questionable flag, capped off by a hail-Larry pass that featured 1) a grade-school-quality, shove-in-the-back offensive pass-interference penalty, which the officials missed, 2) an interception by the Packers, which the officials missed, and 3) a sad Tweedledee-Tweedledum moment, which no one missed, when two scabs stood tall above a supine 24-year-old out of Notre Dame who asserted his semi-mutual possession of the football mostly with the insole of his shoe, upon which the two zebras double-crossed one another, offering contrary signals: one threw up his two arms — Touchdown!— as the other wheeled his arms to a stop like broken clock hands — turnover, time expired. They were close enough to whisper to each other. They could have looked into each other's eyes. The replays shows that, quickly, they did. Fear. All fear.

Somehow, of course, the touchdown won, as if there were no rules, no law at all. Pete Carroll gave it all the immediate, flailing rah-rah, 15 yards from an angry scrum. Seattle went nuts. Like G-8 nuts. In that moment, a riot seemed possible. The whole world started talking to anyone with a microphone.

You slept.

In the television booth, Jon Gruden stood at some weird arm's-length from Mike Tirico. The whole thing seemed to hurt him, or gross him out at the very least. ESPN, of course, brought in some expert who sincerely asserted that Green Bay'd had possession of the ball at game's end. "I don't like it," Jon Gruden said, which is the most sensible and judicious thing he ever has. Then they threw it back to the studio, where shock was registered, and then they threw the mess back to Seattle, where Stuart Scott shouted his narration of the highlights as if there was outrage in every sack. The talking into microphones continued. Hours passed, hashing and rehashing. The word "travesty" was used. It was repeated. More experts. The planet turned.

Two things you can be sure of — two certainties — in all those darkling hours of newsbreak between the time you drifted off and the time you rose: 1) No one mentioned the word "union," because no one ever does in this country, even when the scabs are dancing the idiot polka right in front of our eyes, and 2) get this: No head injuries! No concussions all game long!